Using complex vocabulary and long sentences means the target audience has to concentrate. Using jargon puts people off. Simple words are more effective in communication. Trump is not a simpleton, he speaks like a simpleton, he communicates like a simpleton.

Trump wasn't wanting to be a boxer either. Different job aspirations doesn't stop two people from speaking in a similar way.

I get where you're coming from here. There have been highly successful politicians in the past who deliberately simplified their speech when communicating with unsophisticated audiences..... essentially, speaking "dummy" as a second language, to get their point across. Some were really good at it. Bill Clinton, for example, was a Rhodes Scholar, but you'd have thought he was a simpleton from the Ozarks with the way he communicated to some audiences. Here are two reasons I think Clinton was speaking like a simpleton on purpose, while Trump is doing so because he's actually a simpleton:

(1) There was ample evidence of Clinton's intelligence in his non-political life. He got an elite academic education not based on having a daddy who could donate a building to any university that would hold its nose and hand the dumb kid a diploma, but based on his own efforts. And that included being admitted to the bar, which requires passing a fairly difficult exam. Trump had no such distinctions. In fact, his business career was marked by a ridiculously low return on investment.... exactly the kind of return you'd expect a talent-less heir handed a large family business to get.

(2) Clinton modulated his communication to his audience. While he could sound like a southern-fried hick on the stump in Arkansas, with simple, corny anecdotes, there were also examples of him speaking to audiences that value erudition and sounding extremely informed and articulate, even when working without a prepared speech. Trump, by comparison, sounds like a cranky old man with creeping dementia any time he's not reading directly from a teleprompter. He can be speaking to a congregation of CIA agents, or the G7, etc., and he still sounds like an idiot.

I appreciate you modeling the right-wing misogyny so well, because it really drives home my point. A huge portion of the anti-Hillary-Clinton rhetoric took the form not of specific objections to things she'd done, but rather just a general discomfort with the idea of a woman in a position of power. That brand of misogynist nearly always identifies himself by his focus on gender as part of his critique. It's not just with Clinton, of course. I well remember people pushing a doctored photo of Michelle Obama purporting to show a bulge in her groin.... again, the implied critique being that powerful women must secretly be men. Janet Reno got the same treatment. That scumbag, John McCain, once told a "joke" about a teenaged Chelsea Clinton that asked why she was so ugly, the "punchline" being that Janet Reno was her father. I think the same hatred of strong women that makes it so you just couldn't resist questioning Hillary Clinton's sex is what was behind a good chunk of opposition against her.

And some voted for her specifically because of that.

Just as some voted against her because of that.

In a country this huge, there must have been at least a handful of people who voted for her based on her gender. But given the VAST under-representation of women in elected office in this country, there doesn't seem to be a lot of pro-female-candidate voting in this country, whereas there does seem to be a lot of anti-female-candidate voting.

And, like some voted for Obama because he is black.

And how some voted against him because he's black.

Again, with a country this big, there are bound to be people in both those groups, but the pattern of VAST under-representation of blacks in elected office in this country suggests there's a whole lot more of the latter than the former.

Here's another way to test that idea. Take a look at non-black non-white voters as the "control group" -- basically an indication of how people tended to vote when they didn't have a dog in the fight, racially speaking. With Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, Indians, etc., who had nobody of their own racial group in the race, what did they think, as between Obama and McCain, and later Obama and Romney? Well, each of the sub-groups of that control group agreed: Obama was the much better choice. The outlier wasn't the way blacks voted -- they preferred Obama just like the racially neutral voters did. The outlier was the white electorate, which alone among all measured racial groups, preferred the white guy in both elections..... just as they've gone for a white guy in every single one of the nation's 58 presidential elections. Clearly there are a bunch of voters who support someone just because he's white.

I appreciate you modeling the right-wing misogyny so well, because it really drives home my point. A huge portion of the anti-Hillary-Clinton rhetoric took the form not of specific objections to things she'd done, but rather just a general discomfort with the idea of a woman in a position of power. That brand of misogynist nearly always identifies himself by his focus on gender as part of his critique. It's not just with Clinton, of course. I well remember people pushing a doctored photo of Michelle Obama purporting to show a bulge in her groin.... again, the implied critique being that powerful women must secretly be men. Janet Reno got the same treatment. That scumbag, John McCain, once told a "joke" about a teenaged Chelsea Clinton that asked why she was so ugly, the "punchline" being that Janet Reno was her father. I think the same hatred of strong women that makes it so you just couldn't resist questioning Hillary Clinton's sex is what was behind a good chunk of opposition against her.

In a country this huge, there must have been at least a handful of people who voted for her based on her gender. But given the VAST under-representation of women in elected office in this country, there doesn't seem to be a lot of pro-female-candidate voting in this country, whereas there does seem to be a lot of anti-female-candidate voting.

Again, with a country this big, there are bound to be people in both those groups, but the pattern of VAST under-representation of blacks in elected office in this country suggests there's a whole lot more of the latter than the former.

Here's another way to test that idea. Take a look at non-black non-white voters as the "control group" -- basically an indication of how people tended to vote when they didn't have a dog in the fight, racially speaking. With Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, Indians, etc., who had nobody of their own racial group in the race, what did they think, as between Obama and McCain, and later Obama and Romney? Well, each of the sub-groups of that control group agreed: Obama was the much better choice. The outlier wasn't the way blacks voted -- they preferred Obama just like the racially neutral voters did. The outlier was the white electorate, which alone among all measured racial groups, preferred the white guy in both elections..... just as they've gone for a white guy in every single one of the nation's 58 presidential elections. Clearly there are a bunch of voters who support someone just because he's white.

I did not support her.

Not because of her gender, though.

Because she was a horrible person who couldn't tell the truth to save her life.

Yes, but that vague statement isn't as valuable as identifying how the cycle works. As I showed, the way it works here is that when Democrats have the White House for more than a single term, we get prosperity, which makes people more vulnerable to right-wing rhetoric that dismisses the value of social safety nets and instead pitches policies favoring the prosperous.

In 2016, Obamas third term may have happened, if the Dems had nominated a decent person.

We know that not to be the case, because they actually did so, and yet Trump won.

I'm not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton. I will never forgive her for her Iraq war vote, for example. But she's a decent candidate by any reasonable measure. She's smart and hard working (look at the way she demolished Trump in the debates), and she was extremely experienced, having spent many years paying her dues. Her policies were somewhere between center-left (by the standards of US political norms) and center-right (by the standards of wealthy-nation political norms generally), so nothing indecent there. She was unusually honest relative to major politicians generally (her scorecards according to various independent fact-checkers like Politifact tend to be among the best of major political candidates). And she appears to be astonishingly free of corruption (there was basically a non-stop investigation for a quarter century, trying to find something to hold against her, and the best they ever came up with is that she, like her predecessors in the role, had used private email for public work). She was a decent candidate.

Because she was a horrible person who couldn't tell the truth to save her life.

And many, many other reasons...

It time for a female president.

Just not THAT female.

... You mean because she is a democrat? Because even though I did not vote for her, she sure as hell is not a "horrible person." Of course if you are gullible enough to believe that she had Vince Foster murdered, you would certainly believe that she was indeed a horrible person.

If you believe Trump to be good, honest and morally upright, maybe you are BLIND as well.

Yes, but that vague statement isn't as valuable as identifying how the cycle works. As I showed, the way it works here is that when Democrats have the White House for more than a single term, we get prosperity, which makes people more vulnerable to right-wing rhetoric that dismisses the value of social safety nets and instead pitches policies favoring the prosperous.

We know that not to be the case, because they actually did so, and yet Trump won.

I'm not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton. I will never forgive her for her Iraq war vote, for example. But she's a decent candidate by any reasonable measure. She's smart and hard working (look at the way she demolished Trump in the debates), and she was extremely experienced, having spent many years paying her dues. Her policies were somewhere between center-left (by the standards of US political norms) and center-right (by the standards of wealthy-nation political norms generally), so nothing indecent there. She was unusually honest relative to major politicians generally (her scorecards according to various independent fact-checkers like Politifact tend to be among the best of major political candidates). And she appears to be astonishingly free of corruption (there was basically a non-stop investigation for a quarter century, trying to find something to hold against her, and the best they ever came up with is that she, like her predecessors in the role, had used private email for public work). She was a decent candidate.

That's because there is not ONE SPECIFIC reason.

As I said, the Dems may have won last time if they had nominated a decent person for the job.

That's just ONE reason: next time have a quality candidate who is not hatable, and not such a liar, mot such a crook, and the list goes on and on and on...

A decent, even a HALF decent Dem candidate should have easily defeated Trump.

... You mean because she is a democrat? Because even though I did not vote for her, she sure as hell is not a "horrible person." Of course if you are gullible enough to believe that she had Vince Foster murdered, you would certainly believe that she was indeed a horrible person.

If you believe Trump to be good, honest and morally upright, maybe you are BLIND as well.

When Hillary Clinton referred to a Villanova game, in which Villanova had come from behind to win as a "come-from-behind-victory," Politifact, bizarrely, labeled this "mostly false," since they deemed that Villanova hadn't been down late enough into the second half for them to consider coming from behind to win to be a "come-from-behind-victory." That's just how desperate Politifact was to find falsehoods by Clinton to balance against those of Trump: they seized on a demonstrably true statement that would have been trivial anyway, and threw that in the "mostly false" category.

Now, of course, different fact checkers will show different stats. But, I think you'll find that any reputable organization that was doing fact checks showed Clinton to be markedly more honest than her opponent in 2016, and I think if you were to look at it honestly you'd have to admit she sticks closer to the truth than is usual for major politicians (possibly because she knows the media is poised to seize on the slightest bending of the truth to use against her).

As for the notion that she's a horrible person -- how so? As a reminder, this is a woman who dedicated the first half of her life to being a supportive wife and mother, and appears to have succeeded well at that.... all evidence suggests that Chelsea Clinton grew up to be a dignified, insightful, accomplished, and well-adjusted woman. Hillary Clinton seems to have her ego well in check: she swallowed her pride after her husband's infidelity and stuck around to make the marriage work, in the interest of the family. And picture how that marriage would have looked back when she chose it -- she came from a fair amount of money and had a bright political future in her own right ahead of her, yet agreed to move to the ass end of nowhere to support her husband's political career. That relative lack of ego really contrasts with the caricature of her that right-wingers push. Similarly, in 2008, when, despite Hillary getting more votes in the nomination fight that her opponent, Obama was made the nominee, she again swallowed her pride in the interest of the greater good -- campaigning enthusiastically for the man who defeated her, and then even when stiffed for the VP slot, agreeing to take a lesser position in his cabinet. Is that how a horrible person behaves? For that matter, despite having come from fairly comfortable circumstances in her youth, she spent pretty much her whole life advocating for the less privileged, and particularly for women and children in poor nations.... a group that isn't exactly going to be able to write her a big campaign check, or even show up to vote for her. Is that how a horrible person behaves? And, moreover, we're talking about a woman who was investigated pretty much non-stop from 1992 to today, and so far no significant misconduct has ever emerged -- no abuse of power, no extramarital trysts, etc.

I'm genuinely curious what evidence you see that she's horrible and dishonest.... other than her gender, of course.